A discreet philosopher
Many years ago, I read in Spanish translation a book on Marx which was so clear, suggestive and unprejudiced that I spent a long time looking for other books by its author, Isaiah Berlin. I later discovered that until recently his work had been difficult to find since it was scattered, if not buried, in academic publications. With the exception of his books on Vico and Herder, and the four essays on freedom, which were available in the English language world, most of his work led the quiet life of the library and the specialist journal. Now, thanks to a former student of his, Henry Hardy, who has collected together his essays, these are now available in four volumes: Russian Thinkers, Against the Current, Concepts and Categories and Personal Impressions.
This is an important event since Isaiah Berlin — a Latvian, brought up and educated in England, where he has been Professor of Social and Political Theory in Oxford and President of the British Academy – is one of the most exceptional minds of our time. He is a political thinker and essayist of extraordinary breadth whose work provides a rare pleasure in its skill and brilliance as well as offering an invaluable guide for understanding, in all their complexity, the moral and historical problems faced by contemporary man.
Professor Berlin believes passionately in ideas and in the influence that these ideas have on the behaviour of individuals and societies, although, at the same time, as a good pragmatist, he is aware of the space that usually opens up between ideas and the words that seek to express them and between the words and the deeds that purport to put them into practice. Despite their intellectual density, his books never seem abstract to us — unlike, for example, the work of Michel Foucault or the latest books of Roland Barthes – or the result of a speculative and rhetorical virtuosity that has, at some moment, cut its moorings with reality. Instead, they are deeply rooted in the common experience of the people. The collection of essays, Russian Thinkers, is an epic fresco of nineteenth-century Russia in intellectual and political terms, but the most outstanding characters are not people but ideas: these shine, move around, challenge each other and change with the vigour
of heroes in an adventure novel. In that other beautiful book on a similar theme—To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson — the thoughts of the protagonists seem to transpire from the persuasive and varied portraits that the author draws of his characters. Here, by contrast, it is the concepts that they formulated, the ideals and arguments with which they confronted each other, and their intuitions and knowledge which define the figures of Tolstoy, Herzen, Belinski, Bakunin and Turgenev, which make them plausible or reprehensible.
But even more than Russian Thinkers, it is the collection Against the Current that will doubtless remain as the major contribution of Professor Berlin to the culture of our time. Each essay in this magisterial work reads like a chapter of a novel whose action takes place in the world of thought and in which the heroes and the villains are ideas. Thanks to this scholar who never loses a sense of balance and who can clearly see the wood for the trees, Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Hume, Sorel, Marx, Disraeli and even Verdi are seen to have a great contemporary significance and the things that they believed, put forward or criticized illuminate in a powerful way the political and social conflicts that we wrongly considered to be specific to our age.
The most surprising thing about this thinker is that he appears, at first sight, not to offer ideas of his own. It might seem nonsense to say this, but it is not nonsense because when one reads him, one has the impression that in these essays, Isaiah Berlin achieves what, after Flaubert (and because of him), most modern novelists have tried to achieve in their novels: to erase themselves, to make themselves invisible, to offer the illusion that their stories are self-generated. There are many techniques for ‘making the narrator disappear’ in a novel. The technique that Professor Berlin uses to make us feel that he is not behind his texts is ‘fair play’. This is the scrupulous moral purity with which he analyses, exhibits, summarizes and quotes the thoughts of others, considering all their arguments, weighing up the extenuating circumstances, the constraints of the age, never pushing the words or ideas of others in one direction or another to make them appear similar to his own. This objectivity in the transmission of the inventions of others gives rise to the fantastic impression that, in these books which say so many things, Isaiah Berlin himself has nothing of his own to say.
This is, of course, a rigorously false impression. ‘Fair play’ is only a technique which, like all narrative techniques, has only one function:
to make the content more persuasive. A story that seems not to be told by anyone in particular, which pretends to be making itself, by itself, at the moment of reading, can often be more plausible and engrossing for the reader. A thought that seems not to exist by itself, that reaches us indirectly, through what certain eminent men from different epochs and cultures thought at specific moments in their life, or one that professes to be born not out of the creative effort of an individual mind, but rather out of the contrast between the philosophical and political conceptions of others and the gaps and errors in these conceptions, can be more convincing than a thought that is presented, simply and arrogantly, as a single theory. The discretion and modesty of Isaiah Berlin are, in fact, a wily stratagem.
He is a ‘reformist’ philosopher, a defender of individual sovereignty, convinced both of the need for change and social progress and of the inevitable concessions that the latter demands of the former. He is a believer in freedom as an alternative undertaking for individuals and nations, although he is aware of the obligations that economic, cultural and political conditions bring to bear on this option for freedom and is a clear defender of ‘pluralism’, that is, of tolerance and of the coexistence of different ideas and forms of life, and a resolute opponent of any form of despotism, be it intellectual or social. This all obviously says something about the man, but it is also, to some extent, a way of depriving the reader of the pleasure of discovering these ideas through that lingering, subtle and indirect method — a novelist’s method – that Professor Berlin uses to expound his convictions.
A few years back, I lost my taste for political utopias, those apocalypses that promise to bring heaven down to earth: I now know that they usually lead to injustices as serious as those they hope to put to right. Since then, I have thought that common sense is the most valuable of political virtues. Reading Isaiah Berlin, I have come to see clearly something that I had intuited in a confused way. That real progress, which has withered or overthrown the barbarous practices and institutions that were the source of infinite suffering for man, and has established more civilized relations and styles of life, has always been achieved through a partial, heterodox and deformed application of social theories. Social theories in the plural, which means that different, sometimes irreconcilable, ideologies have brought about identical or similar forms of progress. The prerequisite was always that these systems should be flexible and could be amended and reformed when
they moved from the abstract to the concrete and came up against the daily experience of human beings. The filter at work, which separates what is desirable from what is not desirable in these systems, is the criterion of practical reason. It is a paradox that someone like Isaiah Berlin, who loves ideas so much and moves among them with such ease, is always convinced that it is ideas that must give way if they come into contradiction with human reality, since if the reverse occurs, the streets are filled with guillotines and firing-squad walls and the reign of the censors and the policemen begins.
Of the authors that I have read in the past few years, Isaiah Berlin is the one who has impressed me the most. His philosophical, historical and political opinions seem to me illuminating and instructive. However, I feel that although perhaps few people in our time have seen in such a penetrating way what life is — the life of the individual in society, the life of societies in their time, the impact of ideas on daily experience — there is a whole other dimension of man that does not appear in his vision, or does so in a furtive way: the dimension that Georges Bataille has described better than anyone else. This is the world of unreason that underlies and sometimes blinds and kills reason; the world of the unconscious which, in ways that are always unverifiable and very difficult to detect, impregnates, directs and sometimes enslaves consciousness; the world of those obscure instincts that, in unexpected ways, suddenly emerge to compete with ideas and often replace them as a form of action and can even destroy what these ideas have built up. Nothing could be further from the pure, serene, harmonious, lucid and healthy view of man held by Isaiah Berlin than this sombre, confused, sickly and fiery conception of Bataille. And yet I suspect that life is probably something that embraces and mixes these two enemies into a single truth, in all their powerful incongruity.
Washington, DC, November 1980